The Conflict Part 13

The old man rubbed his brow--his nose--his chin--pulled at the tufts of hair in his ears--fumbled with his cuffs. All of these gestures indicated interest and attention.

"Isn't the real truth not Victor Dorn or Victor Dorns but a changed and changing world?" pursued the girl. "And if that's so, haven't you either got to adopt new methods or fall back? That's the way it looks to me--and we women have got intuitions if we haven't got sense."

"_I_ never said women hadn't got sense," replied the old man. "I've sometimes said MEN ain't got no sense, but not women. Not to go no further, the women make the men work for 'em--don't they? THAT'S a pretty good quality of sense, _I_ guess."

But she knew he was busily thinking all the time about what she had said. So she did not hesitate to go on: "Instead of helping Victor Dorn by giving him things to talk about, it seems to me I'd USE him, father."

"Can't do anything with him. He's crazy," declared Hastings.

"I don't believe it," replied Jane. "I don't believe he's crazy. And I don't believe you can't manage him. A man like that--a man as clever as he is--doesn't belong with a lot of ignorant tenement-house people.

He's out of place. And when anything or anybody is out of place, they can be put in their right place. Isn't that sense?"

The old man shook his head--not in negation, but in uncertainty.

"These men are always edging you on against Victor Dorn--what's the matter with them?" pursued Jane. "_I_ saw, when Davy Hull talked about him. They're envious and jealous of him, father. They're afraid he'll distance them. And they don't want you to realize what a useful man he could be--how he could help you if you helped him--made friends with him--roused the right kind of ambition in him."

"When a man's ambitious," observed Hastings, out of the fullness of his own personal experience, "it means he's got something inside him, teasing and nagging at him--something that won't let him rest, but keeps pushing and pulling--and he's got to keep fighting, trying to satisfy it--and he can't wait to pick his ground or his weapons."

"And Victor Dorn," said Jane, to make it clearer to her father by putting his implied thought into words, "Victor Dorn is doing the best he can--fighting on the only ground that offers and with the only weapons he can lay hands on."

The old man nodded. "I never have blamed him--not really," declared he. "A practical man--a man that's been through things--he understands how these things are," in the tone of a philosopher. "Yes, I reckon Victor's doing the best he can--getting up by the only ladder he's got a chance at."

"The way to get him off that ladder is to give him another," said Jane.

A long silence, the girl letting her father thresh the matter out in his slow, thorough way. Finally her young impatience conquered her restraint. "Well--what do you think, popsy?" inquired she.

"That I've got about as smart a gel as there is in Remsen City,"

replied he.

"Don't lay it on too thick," laughed she.

He understood why she was laughing, though he did not show it. He knew what his much-traveled daughter thought of Remsen City, but he held to his own provincial opinion, nevertheless. Nor, perhaps, was he so far wrong as she believed. A cross section of human society, taken almost anywhere, will reveal about the same quant.i.ty of brain, and the quality of the mill is the thing, not of the material it may happen to be grinding.

She understood that his remark was his way of letting her know that he had taken her suggestion under advis.e.m.e.nt. This meant that she had said enough. And Jane Hastings had made herself an adept in the art of handling her father--an accomplishment she could by no means have achieved had she not loved him; it is only when a woman deeply and strongly loves a man that she can learn to influence him, for only love can put the necessary sensitiveness into the nerves with which moods and prejudices and whims and such subtle uncertainties can be felt out.

The next day but one, coming out on the front veranda a few minutes before lunch time she was startled rather than surprised to see Victor Dorn seated on a wicker sofa, hat off and gaze wandering delightedly over the extensive view of the beautiful farming country round Remsen City. She paused in the doorway to take advantage of the chance to look at him when he was off his guard. Certainly that profile view of the young man was impressive. It is only in the profile that we get a chance to measure the will or propelling force behind a character. In each of the two main curves of Dorn's head--that from the top of the brow downward over the nose, the lips, the chin and under, and that from the back of the head round under the ear and forward along the lower jaw--in each of these curves Dorn excelled.

She was about to draw back and make a formal entry, when he said, without looking toward her:

"Well--don't you think it would be safe to draw near?"

The tone was so easy and natural and so sympathetic--the tone of Selma Gordon--the tone of all natural persons not disturbed about themselves or about others--that Jane felt no embarra.s.sment whatever. "I've heard you were very clever," said she, advancing. "So, I wanted to have the advantage of knowing you a little better at the outset than you would know me."

"But Selma Gordon has told me all about you," said he--he had risen as she advanced and was shaking hands with her as if they were old friends. "Besides, I saw you the other day--in spite of your effort to prevent yourself from being seen."

"What do you mean?" she asked, completely mystified.

"I mean your clothes," explained he. "They were unusual for this part of the world. And when anyone wears unusual clothes, they act as a disguise. Everyone neglects the person to center on the clothes."

"I wore them to be comfortable," protested Jane, wondering why she was not angry at this young man whose manner ought to be regarded as presuming and whose speech ought to be rebuked as impertinent.

"Altogether?" said Dorn, his intensely blue eyes dancing.

In spite of herself she smiled. "No--not altogether," she admitted.

"Well, it may please you to learn that you scored tremendously as far as one person is concerned. My small nephew talks of you all the time--the 'lady in the lovely pants.'"

Jane colored deeply and angrily. She bent upon Victor a glance that ought to have put him in his place--well down in his place.

But he continued to look at her with unchanged, laughing, friendly blue eyes, and went on: "By the way, his mother asked me to apologize for HIS extraordinary appearance. I suppose neither of you would recognize the other in any dress but the one each had on that day. He doesn't always dress that way. His mother has been ill. He wore out his play-clothes. If you've had experience of children you'll know how suddenly they demolish clothes. She wasn't well enough to do any tailoring, so there was nothing to do but send Leonard forth in his big brother's unchanged cast-offs."

Jane's anger had quite pa.s.sed away before Dorn finished this simple, ingenuous recital of poverty unashamed, this somehow fine laying open of the inmost family secrets. "What a splendid person your sister must be!" exclaimed she.

She more than liked the look that now came into his face. He said: "Indeed she is!--more so than anyone except us of the family can realize. Mother's getting old and almost helpless. My brother-in-law was paralyzed by an accident at the rolling mill where he worked. My sister takes care of both of them--and her two boys--and of me--keeps the house in band-box order, manages a big garden that gives us most of what we eat--and has time to listen to the woes of all the neighbors and to give them the best advice I ever heard."

"How CAN she?" cried Jane. "Why, the day isn't long enough."

Dorn laughed. "You'll never realize how much time there is in a day, Miss Jane Hastings, until you try to make use of it all. It's very interesting--how much there is in a minute and in a dollar if you're intelligent about them."

Jane looked at him in undisguised wonder and admiration. "You don't know what a pleasure it is," she said, "to meet anyone whose sentences you couldn't finish for him before he's a quarter the way through them."

Victor threw back his head and laughed--a boyish outburst that would have seemed boorish in another, but came as naturally from him as song from a bird. "You mean Davy Hull," said he.

Jane felt herself coloring even more. "I didn't mean him especially,"

replied she. "But he's a good example."

"The best I know," declared Victor. "You see, the trouble with Davy is that he is one kind of a person, wants to be another kind, thinks he ought to be a third kind, and believes he fools people into thinking he is still a fourth kind."

Jane reflected on this, smiled understandingly. "That sounds like a description of ME," said she.

"Probably," said Victor. "It's a very usual type in the second generation in your cla.s.s."

"My cla.s.s?" said Jane, somewhat affectedly. "What do you mean?"

"The upper cla.s.s," explained Victor.

Jane felt that this was an opportunity for a fine exhibition of her democracy. "I don't like that," said she. "I'm a good American, and I don't believe in cla.s.ses. I don't feel--at least I try not to feel--any sense of inequality between myself and those--those less--less--fortunately off. I'm not expressing myself well, but you know what I mean."

"Yes, I know what you mean," rejoined Victor. "But that wasn't what I meant, at all. You are talking about social cla.s.ses in the narrow sense. That sort of thing isn't important. One a.s.sociates with the kind of people that pleases one--and one has a perfect right to do so.

If I choose to have my leisure time with people who dress a certain way, or with those who have more than a certain amount of money, or more than a certain number of servants or what not--why, that's my own lookout."

"I'm SO glad to hear you say that," cried Jane. "That's SO sensible."

"Sn.o.bbishness may be amusing," continued Dorn, "or it may be repulsive--or pitiful. But it isn't either interesting or important.

The cla.s.ses I had in mind were the economic cla.s.ses--upper, middle, lower. The upper cla.s.s includes all those who live without work--aristocrats, gamblers, thieves, preachers, women living off men in or out of marriage, grown children living off their parents or off inheritances. All the idlers."

Jane looked almost as uncomfortable as she felt. She had long taken a secret delight in being regarded and spoken of as an "upper cla.s.s"

person. Henceforth this delight would be at least alloyed.